This blog is produced by the Consortium for Project Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for anyone interested in the practical application of leadership to project management. We aim to publish meaningful articles by various authors on a monthly basis focused on stories about lessons learned in leading and managing projects.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

In the last blog we
stressed the importance of judgment for successful project management. Robert
Goehle, from the US Department of Energy (DOE), had to resort to judgment when
attempting to adhere to one of the key principles of project management: Strive
to meet the customer’s needs!1

Good
project managers understand that it is important to involve the customer in the
project deeply. Involvement can mean many things, but generally requires the
project manager to listen to and be responsive to the customer’s needs.

Listening and responsiveness
do not mean always accepting the customer’s point of view. Following are two
examples in which customers were deeply involved in the projects, but the
extent to which their initial demands were met differed considerably.

A Research Facility
with Only One Line In

One project entailed
the design and building of a facility for ecological research and was operated
by a local university (the customer) at a site operated by the DOE. The
facility would house a veterinary-type clinic for observation, surgery and
autopsy of small animals. As most of the researchers using the facility would
have offices elsewhere, the customer required only a single telephone line for
the entire facility.

The DOE site manager
decided that the facility must comply with DOE standards, and this included
multiple phone lines, fiber optics, computer capability, and a fire
notification system. These applied to all new facilities constructed no matter
what their functions.

The customer was
furious when informed of this because these requirements were going to add
substantial cost to the project, and the customer had a limited budget. At that
point the customer proposed doing away with all the communication lines to the
facility, settling for a cellular phone. The DOE site manager still found this
idea unacceptable; all facilities located on site must be on the site system.

It was a delicate
situation for the DOE project manager, whose job was to provide oversight of
the project and serve as the go-between for the customer and the DOE site
manager. Despite the site manager’s requirements, the project manager was
convinced that the customer was right. Under these unique circumstances, the
Project Manager believed the DOE standard was inappropriate. The site manager,
however, was adamant about his requirements. Thus, the Project Manager decided
to take the case to DOE headquarters and argue on behalf of the customer.

In this case, a waiver
was granted. The facility was constructed with a single phone line, and the
project was completed within budget.

A Testing Facility for
Multiple Customers

In the second project,
led by the same Project Manager, the mission was to design and build a facility
to test products for five different customers. The new facility was to provide
environmental test chambers that could quickly raise and lower temperatures.
Each customer had completely different temperature requirements for the
products to be tested. This meant that the facility had to provide multiple
ovens or additional environmental chambers to satisfy all the different
requirements. The result was that the total estimated cost of the facility was
much higher than the approved budget.

The Project Manager
approached the customers separately and tried to get them to relax their
requirements so that the project would be able to meet its budget. The
customers listened to him, but were clear that they could not compromise on
their requirements. While the Project Manager wanted to satisfy his customers,
he realized that unless he found a way to get them to relax their requirements
they would all wind up with nothing. Therefore, he decided to approach them one
more time to ask them to relax their requirements, but this time he approached them
as a group.

Each customer was
provided with the temperature ranges required by the other four. They all were
requested to adjust their requirements to the next closest set of requirements.
At first, there was resistance to changing anything. Each customer felt that
the requirements could not be changed. But once they realized that unless they
collaborated, none of them would get anything, they worked together to
streamline their requirements so the project could succeed. By combining
requirements, they reduced by half the number of ovens and environmental test
chambers. In the case of special needs, small units would be purchased at a
greatly reduced cost. Since fewer units were needed, the size of the facility
was likewise reduced.

In both examples the
project manager fully engaged and worked with the customers and met budget
constraints. However, in the first case he was willing to confront authorities
to meet the customer’s requirements, while in the second case he confronted the
customers and convinced them to modify their requirements.

These two examples
demonstrate that when it comes to meeting customer needs, context and customer
engagement are key. John Russell, former vice president of Harley-Davidson
Europe, put it this way: “The more you engage with customers the clearer things
become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”

In his book Six Action Shoes,
Edward de Bono relates pragmatism to context-sensitivity. “Some people condemn
pragmatism because they believe that pragmatism seems to be a way of acting
without principles. Pragmatism does not mean being unprincipled: it means the
pragmatic use of principles. Pragmatism is when you do what can be done to
achieve an objective and put as much emphasis on practicality as on principles…
Pragmatism means being sensitive to the situation...”2

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What is "Living Order"?

Embracing the "living order" concept is the first practice of project leadership. Leaders must be comfortable leading in today's environment of constant change. Bergson (1907) identified two types of order: the traditional concept of perfect geometric order, and living order -- which can be messy, even chaotic, with project problems and surprises in an evolving organization.